On May 17, 1996, Charlie Rose assembled a panel of writers on his PBS talk show to discuss "The Future of American Fiction." Sitting around Mr. Rose's circular table on his signature all-black set were Mark Leyner, Jonathan Franzen, and David Foster Wallace. At the time, Mr. Leyner, was the best known of the bunch, having appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in advance of the release of his novel Et, Tu, Babe in 1992. Mr. Franzen was promoting Strong Motion, his second novel. Mr. Wallace was just coming to prominence for Infinite Jest, his 1,079-page novel.  read more »

Robert McCrum, literary editor of the UK Sunday paper The Observer, stepped down this month after a decade on the job. Yesterday he deployed a parting shot both wistful and sober-minded. "When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world of books was in limbo between hot metal and cool word processing, " he writes, with a nostalgia that comes off not a little anachronistic, considering we're talking about 1996 here and not 1958. "Everything smelled of the lamp. It was a world of ink and paper; of cigarettes, coffee and strong drink. Our distinguished critic George Steiner used to submit his copy in annotated typescript."

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The legend of Mark Leyner started small. It quickly grew out of control.

“I was an infinitely hot and dense dot. So begins the autobiography of a feral child who was raised by huge and lurid puppets. An autobiography written wearing wrist weights,” Mr. Leyner wrote in one of the riffs—“chapters” would be too conventional a description of his style—in his 1990 book, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.

Mr. Leyner, who lived in Hoboken, had already published I Smell Esther Williams, a collection of experimental stories that The Times called “prodigiously original.” My Cousin was met with similarly favorable reviews by critics, who saw in Mr. Leyner’s punctuation-flouting, form-bending, au courant prose a reflection of television’s growing influence on a new generation of writers. In 1992, just before the release of his third book, Et Tu, Babe, he was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a tank top, hoisting an inflatable dumbbell beside the cover line “Mark Leyner Is America’s Best-Built Comic Novelist.”  read more »

Speaking at Harvard yesterday during a discussion with literary critic James Wood, Jonathan Franzen said that "the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times.”

He was referring, of course, to Michiko Kakutani, who presumably got on Mr. Franzen's bad side with her brutal review of his recent memoir, The Discomfort Zone. In that review, Ms. Kakutani wrote: "there is something oddly preening about [Franzen's] self-inventory of sins, as though he actually reveled in being so disagreeable." Also: "Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about [Franzen's unhappy marriage] or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen’s mind remains something of a mystery."  read more »

The National Book Awards were held last night at the Marriot Marquee, bringing hordes of agents and editors--along with authors like Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen, and Joan Didion, who received a lifetime achievement award--to Times Square.

As widely predicted, Denis Johnson won the fiction prize for Tree of Smoke. Mr. Johnson’s wife accepted the award on his behalf because he is on assignment in Iraq.

In non-fiction, New York Times reporter Tim Weiner won for Legacy of Ashes, and in poetry, Robert Hass won for Time and Materials. Sherman Alexie won in the young adult category for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  read more »

In the October Harper's, Ben Marcus offers a lengthy state-of-the-novel essay, subtly titled Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction, in which he spends 13 pages beating up Jonathan Franzen--snubber of Oprah and William Gaddis alike--and the middlebrow fiction establishment he represents.

Using time-travel technology, The Media Mob has moved on to the year 2014 to read the next Harper's state-of-the-novel essay: Reading Harry Potter to The Machines: Crisis of Metaphor and Meaning in the Time of Our Robot Overlords by Josh Schwartz.

Marcus: Experimental fiction is just as valid as mainstream fiction and deserves to be read despite critics like Franzen who think it a) is insulting and unreadable; and b) makes writers like himself feel dumb.

Wolfe: Fiction writers need to leave their comfort zone and do some reporting if they want to salvage the novel from preciousness.

Marcus: "As a writer of sometimes abstract, so-called experimental fiction that can take a more active attention to read, I would say that my ideal reader's Wernicke's area [of the brain] is staffed by an army of jumpsuited code-breakers, working a barn-size space that is strung about the rafters with a mathematically intricate lattice of rope and steel, and maybe gusseted by a synthetic coil that is stronger and more sensitive than either, like guitar strings made from an unraveled spinal cord, each strand tuned to different tensions. The conduits of language that flow past in liquid-cooled bone-hollows could trigger unique vibrations that resonate into an original symphony when my ideal reader scanned a new sentence."

Wolfe: There's no such thing as a billion-footed beast, OK?

Marcus: Numerous citations by bloggers, most of whom only read the excerpt online.

Wolfe: Melanie Griffith's accent in Bonfire of the Vanities; The thoroughbred sex scene in Man in Full; I Am Charlotte Simmons.